by John L. Allen Jr.
BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York
A leading Muslim scholar warned yesterday that setbacks in inter-faith dialogue may be leading the world “into the jaws of Hell,” while one of America’s most prominent rabbis said instead that an Egyptian mufti may be on the brink of working the same magic in Islamic relations with other religions that John Paul II produced in Catholic/Jewish dialogue.
Both men spoke at the United Nations, where an Italian cardinal – whom experts regard as a strong candidate to one day become pope – also argued that religions can play a unique role in bolstering respect for universal human rights.
The occasion was the presentation of Oasis, a scholarly journal dedicated to inter-faith dialogue, especially between Christians and Muslims, launched in 2004 by Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice. Along with Scola, a panel discussion in the U.N.’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library featured Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian scholar at George Washington University; Rabbi Israel Singer, Chairman of the Policy Council for the World Jewish Congress; and Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus.
Nasr offered a stark warning to the more than 200 people in attendance.
“We are standing on the edge of a precipice,” he warned, asserting that after many years of formal dialogues, “very profound misunderstandings” still exist among the religions.
“We may well fall into the jaws of Hell,” he said. “We must pray that this does not happen.”
Though Nasr never referred specifically to controversies surrounding Benedict XVI’s Sept. 12 lecture at the University of Regensburg, which inflamed Muslim sentiment by appearing to link Islam with violence, Nasr nevertheless asserted that “every religion has seen violence,” and that every religion has problems reconciling reason with faith.
“The problem can’t be solved by name-calling,” Nasr said. “God didn’t create one part of humanity more violent than another.”
In a separate interview with NCR, Scola said Benedict XVI’s “true intent” in the Regensburg speech was revealed during his trip late November trip to Turkey, when the pope repeatedly stressed Muslim/Christian brotherhood, and even prayed silently alongside the Grand Mufti of Istanbul during a visit to the city’s storied Blue Mosque.
“The Regensburg lecture, in terms of its content, had a prophetic force which the pope’s trip to Turkey revealed,” Scola said.
Nasr insisted that each of the three Western monotheistic faiths has struggled with tendencies to violence.
“No one is free of this blemish,” he said. “For much of its history Judaism did not have such a problem, but that’s because they didn’t have power. They’ve had power for the last 50 years, and their behavior is not very different.”
Singer struck a much more optimistic note.
Arguing that Pope John Paul II “revolutionized” the Jewish/Catholic relationship, Singer said: “If 1,000 years of history can be turned around in a single generation … almost anything is possible in this world.”
“Just 25 years ago, our dialogue was on the brink of disaster,” Singer said. “Since then, steps have been taken which are just incomprehensible. We should take this as our model.”
Singer then pointed to a statement issued recently by the Grand Mufti of the Al-Azhar University and Mosque in Cairo, Egypt, regarded as among the most authoritative institutions in the Muslim world. According to Singer, Mufti Ali Gom’a denounced the “misguided criminal actions of a minority” who practice violence, thereby “contradicting the centrality of peace in Islam.”
“It’s an authoritative and revolutionary statement … an operational attempt to reject those who have hijacked his own faith,” Singer said of the Grand Mufti’s words, “possibly as revolutionary as the efforts of John Paul II.”
“God works in strange ways, and through strange men,” Singer said.
Scola told NCR that some of his American friends, in tandem with Singer, are planning to host a conference in New York in 2008 to which they intend to invite representatives from Al-Azhar, in part to follow up on statements such as that quoted by Singer.
In his own remarks at the panel discussion, Scola said that inter-religious dialogue can solidify respect for human rights by adding concrete human experience to the abstract principles embodied in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights – principles which some cultures, prominently including several Islamic states, regard as biased in favor of Western values.
Scola warned of a “growing tendency” to set religion against the secular human rights movement, seen by its advocates as expressing “a humanistic universal recognizable by all.”
Scola said documents such as the Universal Declaration have great value, especially in setting ethical and juridical barriers to state power. Nonetheless, he said, they have “fundamental limits,” principally their dependence upon “ideal anthropological models” which non-Western cultures don’t share.
A lasting consensus on human rights, Scola argued, can’t be deduced from abstract principles. It must be worked out in direct exchanges among cultures, including their religious traditions.
“What will be the elements that are shared and/or recognized as universal is something that religious communities and their cultural expressions will define only in their historical encounter and conflict, admixture, and estrangement,” he said.
In that regard, Scola suggested, there’s a need for a new kind of state, one premised on a “new secularism” which is not hostile to the contributions of religious believers and organized religious bodies.
Nasr, the Islamic scholar, argued that the “greatest stumbling block” in dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims is a “tendency to expect everyone on the globe to follow the trajectory of development in the West.”
For example, Nasr said, many Westerners talk about the need for an “Islamic Reformation.” But, he asked, is that really desirable?
“How many people did Oliver Cromwell hang?” he asked provocatively. Instead, Nasr suggested, Westerners should allow Islam to follow “its own internal dynamic.”
Singer was full of praise for Scola, at one point wistfully suggesting that United Nations should have held its own conclave and elected the Italian cardinal as Secretary General.
“Maybe you could succeed at redirecting its budgetary priorities towards their original purposes,” he said. “The 192 countries here could learn from what you’ve done [in fostering dialogue]. They’re trying to do it here, mostly to little avail.”
Anderson recalled Pope John Paul II’s historic 1995 visit to the United Nations, in which the pope argued that freedom of religion and of conscience are “the cornerstones of the structure of human rights and the foundation of every truly free society.” Anderson suggested that Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est “broadened” these concepts.
